Predicting the residual resource of railway tracks.

Abstract

The article is devoted to defining modern methods for assessing the residual resource of railway tracks. Since steel rails are one of the main components of railway transportation, predicting the service life and determining the residual resource of rails are important for ensuring the safe operation of railways. The main sectoral international and domestic regulatory documents have been analyzed, and the general state of the problem has been investigated. It has been established that the service life of railway tracks is determined mainly by the degree of dynamic loading, the number of initial defects during manufacture, the quality of steel rails, and the influence of climatic and electromagnetic loads. Some methods and approaches to determining the residual resource in the world practice, which are based on experimental laboratory tests for the durability of decommissioned defective rails, have been studied. On the basis of the discovered mechanisms for the formation and development of defects, some specific recommendations have been developed in order to increase the operational resource of railway tracks. However, these methods do not take into account the stochastic aspects of the physics of degradation and destruction processes. Therefore, the most effective method for determining the residual resource of various objects is the probabilistic-physical method, which is based on the analysis of the dynamics of the change of the determining parameter. In accordance with the methodology of DSTU 8646:2016, given the data on the initial, current, and limited missed tonnage in which there are no rail failures, the calculation of the residual resource of railway rails is given. Calculations of the residual resource using the probabilistic-physical method on the example of heat-treated rails of passenger railways and using the relative values of the resource parameter have shown results that correspond to statistical data from the operation. The use of the method based on DM-distribution of failures helps to extend the life of rails and reduce operating costs by optimizing maintenance and repair processes.